PORTLAND, OR – Providence Park, home to the MLS Portland Timbers and NWSL’s Portland Thorns soccer teams, undergone several recent renovations that included expanded seating capacity to over 25,000 with associated infrastructure and AV upgrades. And all the sounds of the fan experience couldn’t happen without Dante
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Thunderous sounds of the crowd greet every eventgoer at Portland’s fabled Providence Park. Completed in 1926, Providence Park is the oldest facility configured as a soccer-specific stadium for use by an MLS team and is one of the most historic grounds used by any United States professional soccer team. Two professional soccer teams, the Portland Timbers of MLS and Portland Thorns FC of NWSL, use the facility as their home pitch, and both clubs rank among the top ten in attendance among professional soccer teams (men’s or women’s) in the United States and Canada.
The facility has undergone several recent renovations to expand its seating capacity to over 25,000, with associated infrastructure and AV upgrades. As expected with any MLS stadium, cameras abound around the stadium to catch the never-ending action from several simultaneous angles. The AV feeds are broadcast to multiple top-tier streaming services for the fans who cannot watch the match live.
But there’s much more to the AV experience at Providence Park than just the cameras. Once the gates open, visitors are greeted by public address prompts. Ribbon boards surround the pitch, sharing fun facts about the team or Portland or advertising sponsor products. A vast video board dominates one end of the pitch, where on-field activations like a mini-match or player statistics and highlights are shown to excite the fans. Background music — often themed for the match — resounds throughout every corner of the stadium. And all the sounds of the fan experience couldn’t happen without Dante.
“Our product is really entertainment,” said Robert Rice, VP of Technology at Providence Park. “We have over 50 soccer events here a year. But we also host thousands of people for musical events, graduations, and other memorable experiences. We’re trying to create a space within the city of Portland where people feel welcome and entertained. And Dante helps us do that.”
The independent audio feeds are sent to Yamaha QL5 and QL1 mixing consoles for broadcast preparation. QL series consoles offer all-in-one mixing, processing, and routing capability for live sound, corporate speech events, installations, and more. A Shure AD4D wireless receiver paired with Shure Axient microphones transmits pristine audio via Dante from fieldside for transmission over the stadium’s public address system driven by BSS Soundweb London DSPs. AVIO adapters dot the landscape to help integrate analog signals from external vendors and partners onto the Dante network.
Providence Park has also invested significantly in accessibility for its fans and guests via an assisted listening program from Listen Technologies. Dante makes it easy to route different radio, Spanish language, or television broadcast feeds to assisted listening devices so that fans can have the full experience of watching a soccer game at the stadium.
“Dante helps make my job easier. When I started working here, all our audio transport was analog, much of which was traveling over long distances, which meant lots of different patch points and routing and lots of room for error,” said Dave Spraker, Production Engineer at Providence Park. “Now we’re using Dante to move audio between playback, recording, and streaming devices, as well as our assisted listening system. It’s the backbone for all our production devices.”
Dante Controller software is a key element of the Dante platform, acting as a one-stop shop for managing AV routing — with separate, independently routable streams for audio and video. With Dante’s built-in device discovery, new endpoints appear in Dante Controller for media routing. The single control management plane allows for the universal configuration of devices. A single API supports programming for all Dante products, allowing users to change routing and configuration using external control interfaces or commands. Once the system is installed, signal routing information is stored in the Dante-enabled devices, allowing the Dante ecosystem to run without connected computers. Users don’t have to worry about re-establishing routes when a device is moved or power cycled — saving time, worry, and setup costs.
The financial impact of implementing a network-based AV solution with Dante has been significant for the stadium. It allows the venue to be considered for and host events they were previously incapable of hosting. Plus, Dante allows the AV team to increase revenue by bringing in-house many services that were previously farmed out to third-party services. Dante’s simplicity enables the events team to manage events themselves and even offer premium capabilities as a la carte items.
We’ve invested a lot in the network,” said Rice. “It’s proven to be a smart investment that’s paying dividends in many different areas of our business. Dante is in so many products that we can purchase the right products for us and not have to buy something oversized.”
In the future, Providence Park plans to implement Dante Domain Manager to expand its management capabilities, improve redundancy, increase security and segmentation of duties, and provide additional services. For example, secure bi-directional audio feeds can be provided to TV trucks to share in-house audio or allow the AV team to pull feeds in real-time from Portland Timbers radio to broadcast during or after the games.
The Dante integration delivers pristine, low-latency audio throughout the stadium so that the audience never misses any action or calls on the field, regardless of location.
“In our experience with Dante, it just works,” said Spraker. “It’s easily accessible. If it’s set up in Dante, then we can route it wherever it needs to go. Whatever the last-minute requests are, we can easily fulfill them. Flexibility is key, and Dante really allows us to customize the experience for people.”
View the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbSJBrp5Ook